Monday, August 25, 2014

The mouse that roared. . .

It can hardly be called an oppressed minority when the movement boasts the full assets of the media, Hollywood, and a political party to espouse its position. . . It can hardly be called an oppressed minority when it is made up of people more highly educated and more well paid, on average, than the general population. . . It can hardly be called an oppressed minority when it has so effectively moved from the fringe to the mainstream of society and culture in such a very short period of time. In fact, it is such a successful minority that the average American might well think that a third to half of all Americans are gay. But they are not.

Less than 3 percent of the U.S. population identify
themselves as gay, lesbian or bisexual, the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention reported Tuesday in the first large-scale government
survey measuring Americans’ sexual orientation.

The National Health Interview Survey, which is the government’s
premier tool for annually assessing Americans’ health and behaviors,
found that 1.6 percent of adults self-identify as gay or lesbian, and
0.7 percent consider themselves bisexual.

The overwhelming majority of adults, 96.6 percent, labeled themselves
as straight in the 2013 survey. An additional 1.1 percent declined to
answer, responded “I don’t know the answer” or said they were “something
else.”

The figures offered a slightly smaller assessment of the size of the
gay, lesbian and bisexual population than other surveys, which have
pegged the overall proportion at closer to 3.5 or 4 percent. In
particular, the estimate for bisexuals was lower than in some other
surveys.

That the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender population is a distinct minority is not in dispute. That they are oppressed is a conclusion at odds with the facts. Their movement has been so effective with the media that they have appeared to be larger than the numbers justify. Certainly we have more people experimenting and we have fewer moral constraints both upon such experimentation and upon the choice to identify publicly as gay, lesbian, transgender, or bisexual but we do not see this result in people self-identifying as gay, lesbian, transgender or bisexual. This movement is the mouse (mouth?!) that roared and their influence is substantially greater than there actual representation within the population.

2 comments:

Anonymous
said...

But an elephant stomping in the room is the almost 50% of heterosexual couples living together, co-habitating, shacking up, and fornicating before marriage, a huge problem in the Christian church and families today. This matter deserves even more attention and care, since it is also a sin against God's Word.

I believe an earlier post indicated that the church cannot single out the gays and ignore the cohabiting heterosexuals. It seems that the point here is how well the GLBT have used the media to influence public opinion about the size and oppression of the actually small gay minority.

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